With All Its Contrasts, It Needed an Alias

Near 12th Avenue in Hell's Kitchen, a k a Clinton, the 42nd Street Pizza Restaurant is a holdout to development. Louis Gritsipis, pictured in the doorway, said, “I was not going to move to make them rich.”Credit
Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times

NOT long ago, a Midwestern couple arrived at 48th Street near Ninth Avenue to inspect the $399,000 co-op that their 20-something son wanted them to help buy. After looking over the place, a railroad one-bedroom in a tenement walk-up, the mother looked quizzically at the agent, Donald Kemper, and said, “Now tell me, am I in Hell’s Kitchen, or am I in Clinton?” Mr. Kemper, a Prudential Douglas Elliman vice president who lives in the area, replied, “It depends which one you’re more comfortable with.”

Mr. Kemper’s answer was both sly and accurate, because both names — one rough-and-tumble, the other resolutely respectable — are used by the local community board to define the same area west of Eighth Avenue, from 59th Street to the mid-30s. Hell’s Kitchen, the identity favored by longtime residents, dates to the 1800s, when the neighborhood began its century-plus run as a hotbed of gang violence and squalor. The name Clinton was introduced in 1959 in an attempt to distance the area from that notoriety, which was well deserved as late as the 1980s.

But a funny thing happened on the way to gentrification. As memories of street crime have receded, and as luxury developments have risen, the name Hell’s Kitchen has acquired a kind of gritty cachet. Trendy restaurants on Ninth Avenue incorporate “HK” or “Hell’s Kitchen” into their names, and some developments use Hell’s Kitchen’s perceived edginess as a sales tool. “You don’t need a weather report to remind you: Hell’s Kitchen is sizzling,” declares the site for the 505, a sleek condominium on 47th Street. By contrast, marketing for the Thorndale, a condo conversion of a 1905 carriage house on 45th Street, describes the area as Clinton.

“Hell’s Kitchen has developed over the last 20 years into an equal partner with Clinton,” Mr. Kemper said. “If I’m more affluent and have a family, I’m looking for Clinton, but if I’m a young, hip 20-something buyer coming up from Chelsea or somewhere else, I want to live in Hell’s Kitchen.”

Regardless of what anyone calls it, Victoria Rowan, a writing coach who rents a one-bedroom on 55th Street and Eighth Avenue, loves where she lives. “The creative nerve of the city is very much right here,” she said. “It’s not what I would call a stable neighborhood, but it’s an exciting neighborhood.”

Ms. Rowan moved to the area in 2004 because she wanted proximity to her writing clients, as well as a living room big enough for 10-person workshops. Her 900-square-foot apartment, which costs $2,925 a month, satisfies both needs. “I’m right in the middle of publishing here,” she said. “I live a couple blocks from the Hearst Building and a couple blocks from Random House.”

For her, the integration of the arts into the area’s daily life offers a marvelous perk. Sometimes she walks to 55th Street and Ninth Avenue with her toy poodle, Victor Hugo, to watch the dancers through the windows of the building that houses the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. Or she strolls to Broadway shows or to Theater Row on 42nd Street near Ninth Avenue, a collection of small spaces whose opening in 1978 gave the area a big push.

Hell’s Kitchen’s proximity to the theater district has long attracted show people. During the Academy Awards broadcast this year, many theater folk — Ms. Rowan’s neighbors — assembled in her building’s lobby after a fire broke out in the health food store on the ground floor. “There was the seamstress who did the costumes for ‘Mary Poppins,’ and guys wearing ‘Guys and Dolls’ varsity jackets,” Ms. Rowan recalled. “And all these people were worrying about how the fire ruined Oscar Night, not about whether all their worldly possessions would go up in smoke.”

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Credit
The New York Times

WHAT YOU’LL FIND

The change in the northern part of Hell’s Kitchen in the last two decades has brought in wealthier residents with more education, census data show. From 1990 to 2009, median income (in 2009 dollars) rose to $66,371 from $48,025; the proportion with at least a college degree climbed to 64 percent from 44.

The area remains racially diverse. Among the 45,134 counted as residents in 2009, the proportion of whites held steady at 61 percent; the share of Asians nearly doubled, to 13 percent, and the Hispanic population dipped to 19 percent from 25. The proportion of African-Americans dropped a bit, to 6 percent.

Also, since 1990, the share of residents who never married climbed to 62 percent from 54, while the proportion of households with children fell below 9 percent, more than a point.

The streetscape, too, is markedly changed. Forty-Second Street from Ninth Avenue to the Hudson has become a corridor of gleaming residential towers, whose rentals and condos often offer jaw-dropping river or city views. One, an imposing 63-story black-glass monolith on the south side of 42nd Street between 10th and Dyer Avenues, is called MiMA. According to its developer, the Related Companies, this acronym stands for the Middle of Manhattan; according to the cheeky real estate blog Curbed.com, it stands for the Magical Island of Many Amenities.

Eighth Avenue, too, has high-rises. The InterContinental Hotel opened last year on 44th Street; the spiffy Shake Shack restaurant on its ground floor makes for quite a contrast with the sex shops next door. Two blocks up, the 43-story Platinum condo is billed as New York’s “signature power residence.”

The more intimate scale of the tenement-and-brownstone side streets, where many low- and middle-income people live, is largely protected above 42nd Street by the Special Clinton District, whose zoning generally restricts building heights to seven stories, or 66 feet. “The neighborhood is a steadfast, hardcore group of individuals who love the low-scale character,” said Elisa Gerontianos, co-chairwoman of Community Board 4’s Clinton/Hell’s Kitchen panel on land use.

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Within these limitations, luxury residential has begun pushing west; some even pops up between 10th and 11th. One of the most closely watched is Mercedes House, a zigzagging rental-and-condo complex, whose ground floor has a Mercedes showroom.

Last spring James Dale, an advertising executive, was playing in a gay football league in DeWitt Clinton Park on 53rd Street when he noticed Mercedes House rising across 11th. In May he signed its first lease, trading his fifth-floor walk-up in Chelsea for a $3,250-a-month one-bedroom with river views.

“I wanted a better quality of life,” he said, noting that he plans to use the complex’s outdoor pool when it is built.

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Grumbling about the luxury developments is not unusual among longtime residents. “It’s bringing a different kind of person into the neighborhood,” said Heather Holland Wheaton, a writer who tends the community garden on 52nd Street. “People are very transient. They’ll be here for two years and then move to Connecticut.”

Mr. Dale said that a married colleague did indeed plan to move to the suburbs to have children and “be closer to her horse.” But for his part, buying in Hell’s Kitchen is a possibility. “I’ll live there a couple of years and see how the neighborhood evolves,” he said.

WHAT TO DO

Ninth Avenue has sushi, tapas and jägerschnitzel available within a single block. “All our mom-and-pops are now bars,” lamented Kathleen McGee Treat, the chairwoman of the Hell’s Kitchen Neighborhood Association. “This used to be a neighborhood where if you needed to get your kid a pair of shoes, you could walk over to Mr. Shapiro’s and the child would be fitted for shoes.”

WHAT YOU’LL PAY

The average for a studio condo in Hell’s Kitchen North in the last year was $552,928, said Gary Kahn, a senior vice president of Corcoran; two-bedroom condos averaged $1.56 million. One-bedroom prewar co-ops averaged $499,550. Walk-up co-ops, typically tenements, sold for $643 a square foot on average. The area is “selling faster the first half of this year than the first half of last year,” said Mr. Kemper of Elliman.

A recent look at Streeteasy.com showed 41 one-bedrooms in new developments or conversions renting for $2,750 to $4,800 per month. Most walk-up studios were listed at $1,600 to $2,400.

THE SCHOOLS

Public schools include the highly regarded No. 212, on 48th Street, which got an A on its most recent progress report, and No. 51, which got a B. Students at Public School 51 are being bused by the city to a site on East 91st Street. A new building is expected to open on West 44th in 2013.

The Professional Performing Arts School on 48th Street includes both middle and high schools. The middle school received an A on its report. SAT averages at the high school in 2010 were 437 in reading, 460 in math, and 432 in writing, versus 439, 462, and 434 citywide.

THE COMMUTE

The 1, A, B, C, D, and E trains stop at Columbus Circle. The A, C, and E trains run down Eighth Avenue.

The M50 crosstown bus runs east on 50th Street and west on 49th. Residents complain that the 42nd Street crosstown bus does not run frequently enough to handle the throngs, said Ms. Treat of the neighborhood association.

THE HISTORY

Theories abound for how the area came to be called Hell’s Kitchen. An 1881 New York Times article used the term to refer to a notorious tenement on 39th Street near Ninth Avenue, observing that “vice in its most repulsive form thrives here.”

A version of this article appears in print on September 25, 2011, on Page RE8 of the New York edition with the headline: With All Its Contrasts, It Needed an Alias. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe